&imwidth=800&imheight=600&format=webp&quality=medium "US court temporarily halts execution of Christa Pike, first woman Tennessee may put to death in 200 years")
A federal appeals court temporarily halted the execution of the lone woman on Tennessee’s death row on Wednesday morning, just about an hour before she was scheduled to receive a lethal injection.
In a last-minute decision, the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth District said it needed to review claims that Christa Pike’s legal team made in a bid to stop her execution. The legal team has asked whether Pike can reopen a court proceeding centred around her allegations that she was sexually abused beginning when she was a child, which the state acknowledged at a special hearing in August.
“The interests of justice and the finality of Pike’s impending execution compel the entry of a short stay of execution in order to properly analyse the parties’ fully briefed arguments and resolve the issues on the merits,” the court said.
It’s unclear how long the execution may be halted. It was scheduled for 10 am local time in Nashville.
Although the execution has been halted, it could still proceed later Wednesday, as the state intends to ask the US Supreme Court to vacate the last-minute district court order, an attorney for Pike said. If it does happen, Pike would become the only woman executed in the state in the last 200 years.
“I am not afraid to die. I’m only nervous about the process,” Pike wrote in a letter she penned before Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee denied her clemency petition on Monday, clearing the way for her execution to take place.
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Thanking those who rallied for the governor to intervene and halt the plan, Pike said she was “at peace”, regardless of the outcome of her bid.
Pike, now 50, has been incarcerated since 1995 for the murder of her former classmate, Colleen Slemmer, that year. According to court records, Pike and Slemmer were students at the Job Corps Center in Knoxville when Pike, then 18, tortured and killed her, allegedly over comments Slemmer, 19, had made about her relationship.
Pike’s boyfriend and another friend helped carry out the attack and murder, the records said.
Pike’s case has drawn international attention, with the United Nations recently joining local advocacy groups in their calls for commuting her death sentence.
Their criticisms mainly centre on the childhood abuse and untreated mental illness from which Pike suffered when Slemmer was killed, factors that play much larger roles in how juries make sentencing decisions now than they did at Pike’s trial.
UN experts also said the decades Pike spent in isolation on death row, as the sole woman awaiting execution in Tennessee, should amount to unlawful torture.
After her clemency plea was rejected, Pike’s attorneys issued a statement saying they were “deeply saddened and heartbroken” by the news and mentioned how much their client had changed while incarcerated.
“The 18-year-old girl suffering from severe mental illness and near-debilitating trauma no longer exists,” the attorneys said. “Christa is a 50-year-old remorseful woman who understands her actions, receives proper treatment for her mental illness, and provides for and guides fellow incarcerated women.”
